Field of the Invention
One or more embodiments of the invention are related to the fields of data processing, electronic communication systems, referral reward systems for example as related to electronic commerce. More particularly, but not by way of limitation, one or more embodiments of the invention enable a digital communications monetization system, for example that utilizes at least one computer and at least one application specifically programmed to integrate trackable referrals into digital communications including but not limited to peer-to-peer networks and track the referrals to monetize the communications.
Description of the Related Art
Several technology platforms exist for digital promotion of advertisers, brands, products, and services. However, these existing platforms fail to address digital word-of-mouth promotion, or peer-to-peer digital communications, where one consumer or user promotes a brand, product, merchant or service to one or more other users. Existing platforms include affiliate networks, social marketing, referral marketing, and influencer marketing. None of these existing platforms adequately address digital word-of-mouth promotion.
Affiliate networks are designed for professional content creators and digital publishers. These networks are not appropriate for digital word-of-mouth promotion, because consumers are generally unable or unwilling to participate in the potentially painstaking processes required to join an affiliate network, and to perform the steps involved in utilizing an affiliate network.
Social marketing platforms are typically limited to display of advertisements on social networks. As such these platforms are not actually “social” since they do not directly involve communications between consumers; instead ads simply appear adjacent to social interactions, sometimes utilizing optimization software, for example to make the ads contextually relevant to the social interaction.
Referral marketing platforms generally involve customized, one-off campaigns on behalf of an individual advertiser. These platforms are not built as a platform for digital word-of-mouth promotion across multiple products, services, or brands.
Influencer marketing platforms enlist influencers with large audiences for one-off campaigns. These platforms do not address true digital peer-to-peer word-of-mouth referrals among family and friends, for example.
There are no known platforms that provide practical and effective digital word-of-mouth referral capabilities to users who are engaged in digital communications. There are no known platforms that are unobtrusive, automatic, simple, easy to use, intuitive, and that fit naturally within a peer-to-peer social dialogue. There are no known platforms that apply to essentially all prominent digital channels that people use to communicate with friends, family, and colleagues, such as social media, messaging applications, email, and SMS. There are no known platforms that easily enable people to embed trackable referral links within their digital communications with peers, provide rewards to the referrers, including cash-based incentives, and that provide a broad range of coverage of things the user recommends. There are no known platforms that integrate naturally within social dialogues and are helpful to the recipient, transparent, and non-promotional.
Some existing systems facilitate insertion of referral links into specific documents, such as blogs or web pages. These systems may for example be tools provided by affiliate networks, or plugins for web publishing tools such as WordPress®. A significant limitation of these systems is that they are coupled to specific applications or use cases. There are no known systems that integrate referral generation into general-purpose user input methods, such that the referral generation capability can be used across multiple applications or use cases.
For at least the limitations described above there is a need for a digital communications monetization system that generates trackable referrals in digital communications between a referring user and a receiving user and tracks the referrals to provide rewards in a manner that is universal for all methods of communications between the referring user and receiving user.